Wednesday, August 7, 2013

If I’ve seen it once I’ve seen it a dozen times—the article about the genius stroke Steve Jobs had in locating the bathrooms at Pixar. He “insisted there be only two bathrooms in
the entire Pixar studios, and that these would be in the central space. And of
course this is very inconvenient. No one wants to have to walk 15 minutes to go
to the bathroom. And yet Steve insisted that this is the one place everyone has
to go every day.”

The moral of the story is that Jobs “wanted there to be
mixing. He knew that the human friction makes the sparks, and that when you're
talking about a creative endeavor that requires people from different cultures
to come together, you have to force them to mix. . . And so his design was to
force people to come together even if it was just going to be in the
bathroom."

Now I ask you, does this really make sense?

Do you really
believe, had there been four or six or eight bathrooms spread throughout Pixar,
that somehow Toy Story would have
suffered?

Do you really believe that a
healthy company needs to force its employees to attend mixers near the toilet bowls? (For that matter, do you really think, except for maybe the
Pentagon and a NASA facility here or there, anyone actually has to walk 15 minutes in any office to find a bathroom?
That would certainly limit my Diet Cokes.)

By this theory, incidentally, the smokers in a company
should all be wildly creative because they gather together in a little smelly place about a dozen times a day.

I would propose to you that this story is a function of 1)
Steve Jobs’ halo effect, and 2) the fact that when a company is successful we back-attribute
everything they did to that success.